Magdalena Ehn

Dipl.-Ing. Magdalena Ehn is a third year PhD candidate at the Department of Agrobiotechnology at BOKU Vienna. She received her diploma in phy-tomedicine from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and is currently working in the group of Hermann Bürstmayr at the Institute of Biotechnology in Plant Production at the BOKU campus in Tulln, Austria. After graduating with a thesis on resistance to Fusarium Head Blight and its associations with anther retention in wheat, Magdalena is now working on resistance breeding against common bunt with a focus on organic wheat production. Her dissertation aims to optimize breeding schemes in organic breeding programs by combining different selection methods. Using tools like genomic and marker-assisted selection as well as association and linkage-mapping, she investigates genetic resources for common bunt resistance in bread wheat and how to rapidly introgress these into elite, high-yielding plant material. A main goal of her work is to foster the development of cultivars suitable for organic production systems which unite high yield capacity with good grain quality and durable disease resistance. Magdalena’s project is funded by a DOC-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) and carried out within the multi-disciplinary AgriGenomics doctoral school at BOKU. She is also part of the ECOBREED project for increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of organic crop breeding which is funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 with grant agreement no. 771367.